video games, virtual worlds, education, philanthropy, stuff

My Other Accounts

This is the personal blog of Jesse Powell, co-founder and CEO at Kraken Bitcoin Exchange, formerly of Lewt, Inc.

I will be blogging on things that interest me, and where I think my perspective may be valuable to other people. I will not be blogging often.

Topics you can expect to see discussed include: video games, virtual worlds, education, philanthropy, philosophy, and probably to a lesser extent, politics, psychology, business and law.

It should be noted that I am still acting CEO at Kraken and advisor to Lewt. While I am not blogging here on the behalf of any company, I may to some degree censor my statements to protect their interests and my contractual obligations, especially when it comes proprietary and trade secret information.

If you're looking for news about Kraken, I suggest you follow @KrakenFX on Twitter. If you're looking for some Diablo 2 freebies, I suggest you follow @Lewt on Twitter.

06/02/2015

You're a sexy enchantress. You have many admirers. Some are your closest friends, some would pay for your attention, and others would presume to make a whore of your inbox.

I get a lot of email.

1. At work I get a lot of email that is targeted spam—sales people reaching out to me, often with personalized messages. They can be relentless, and they have set up automation software to help them be relentlessness.

2. On my personal account, I get a lot of real email that is actually meant for other people. My username is generic enough that it surely exists on every email service. I’ve had lawyers send me others’ tax returns for chrissakes.

3. On both accounts, I get a lot of untargeted spam and unwanted notifications for services I never signed up for.

Existing efforts fall short.

Gmail’s new inbox categories are a great help with #3 but they don’t help with #1 and #2.

HashCash implementations, like Penny Post, are not widely adopted and do not allow the recipient to receive or refund the value spent by the sender.

Other services that would filter your mail for you require access to your mail account or require that your mail be forwarded to them, which obviously means that you can't use them for anything private, like your email.

Contacts are whitelisted and come through clear, without requirement to pay.

Those not whitelisted are filtered from your inbox and receive an auto response with a bitcoin address and request for payment in order to have their email appear in your inbox. If payment is received the messages is moved back to your inbox.

Those who do not pay are blacklisted and will never appear in your Inbox nor be responded to again.

No external services and no third parties have access to your data. Everything is contained within your Google account.

What you’ll need:

A Gmail account or Google hosted email for your domain.

A bitcoin address.

The critism: I don’t use Gmail.

The answer: We're looking forward to your port to Thunderbird, Mail.app and Outlook.

10/21/2014

Armchair policymaking is a favorite college pastime of mine. I thought I might write a piece on what the purpose of regulation ought to be, how “consumer protection” has been twisted, how governments of the world as a whole have fallen to regulatory capture by the financial services industry. I could have produced a tome on all the problems with the BitLicense. Instead, I will propose that Lawsky is a political mastermind and we’re all simply pawns in his game.

People are up in arms about the BitLicense, and rightfully so. As proposed it’s a mother of a clusterfuck. Fellow Bitcoiners have expressed concern to me that they might actually have to move out of New York to continue their important work, for the sake of their very lives. It’s going to be like Poland in 1942, Cambodia in 1975. Get out while you can! Brainwallets n’ shit!

My response is “chill”. The purpose of the proposed BitLicense is not to regulate Bitcoin in New York. Lawsky would have to be a lunatic to exclude his state from the largest and inevitable transfer of wealth in history, from the largest business opportunity and economic engine since the Internet. Lawsky is not a lunatic, nor is he an evil genius hellbent on making a dystopia of his state. Let’s give him some credit, or not give him too much credit, and let’s imagine that the purpose of the proposed BitLicense is something more mundane.

I don’t know what Lawsky’s political ambitions are but it’s not a stretch to believe he’ll be running for NY Attorney General in the next cycle. He’ll need political support for such a campaign, and he’ll need to keep his job until then. NY Governor Cuomo, who appointed Lawsky, is up for re-election and he’s certainly got an electorate and donor base to please. Any bad moves on Lawsky’s part surely would reflect poorly on Cuomo. Cuomo don’t play dat.

With the election only a few weeks away, Lawsky’s approach is optimal.

Door-in-the-face, over-the-top initial proposal will make whatever he comes back with next seem reasonable by comparison.

Attack on every possible choke point shows financial incumbents that Lawsky’s on their side. This may be important to Cuomo’s re-election effort and Lawsky’s career going forward.

Attack on every possible choke point forces bitcoin industry to defend every possible choke point, which will give Lawsky support vs. financial incumbents, if he ultimately wants to side with innovation. He’ll need a scapegoat.

The defenses will actually help in crafting intelligent regulation (if that is not an oxymoron).

Timing of the original proposal and comment period leading up to the election, and final outcome not being realized until after the November 4th election allows both incumbents and innovators to remain hopeful going in.

By dragging the process out, Lawsky stays in the spotlight, which, ceteris paribus, will benefit his career.

So, of course the BitLicense. It had to be. If your goal is to further your own political career, it makes complete sense. Anything less would have been sub-optimal.

After speaking with Jan Owen, Commissioner of the California DBO, a few weeks ago about how California is approaching Bitcoin regulation, I don’t think we as an industry have anything to be worried about. Jan seems tech savvy, open minded, encouraging, empathetic and concerned only with the exposure consumers have where they don’t control their own private keys. California will not be following New York, and neither will most other states. And neither will most other countries in the world be following the US at all—they’ve already moved on.

New York will come back with a reasonable proposal, or it will ostracize itself from the rest of the world and fade in to irrelevance as the rest of the world passes it by and its most capable citizens extricate themselves.

My only concern is what effect this will have on San Francisco rents. So, chill. If I’m wrong, I’ve got room on my floor for a few NY Bit-refugees. :)

I leave you with NYDFS' spokesperson's official response to BitLicense criticism.

02/26/2014

I am deeply saddened to hear of the tremendous loss suffered by the Bitcoin community today. Undoubtedly, thousands of lives have been destroyed and innocent people have been left in financial ruin. I’m not often short on imagination but how the damage got to be so severe without anyone noticing is unfathomable. I can’t help but be angry, and frustrated and depressed. All the hard work we’ve done to bring Bitcoin in to the mainstream and now this, and the people. Fuck.

I actually had lunch with Mark and Gonzague in Tokyo just a month ago and despite their banking woes, they were upbeat and excited about their Bitcoin Café. We talked about how we were in it for Bitcoin, and the greater good, and how we should work together. They certainly gave no indication that they were worried about insolvency. Perhaps it was something they’d come to live with, or perhaps they really were oblivious. In time we’ll have the true story. After all, second to Bernie Madoff this is the biggest heist/giveaway/debacle of the century. The replacement value of those 744,408 lost coins must be north of $1 billion—surely international law enforcement bodies will be tripping over themselves to take such a high profile case.

I was just thinking how grateful I am for not having any funds in Gox, and then I realized that I actually do have funds in Gox. You see, the last time I tried to make a withdrawal from Gox, back in 2012, they’d taken 3+ weeks and still hadn’t processed my wire. I determined that they were insolvent, canceled my wire and immediately withdrew my funds via coupon to Bitcoinica. As luck would have it, Bitcoinica got hacked shortly thereafter, never to recover, and what funds remained have been tied up in liquidation proceedings since. And guess who was holding those funds for the liquidator. Can you guess? Mount Fucking Gox, that’s who! Fuck!

I just ate a whole box of Thin Mints.

You know, when Gox got hacked in June of 2011, Roger Ver, one of my oldest friends from the high school Magic: the Gathering days called me up. “I’m at the Mt. Gox office. How soon can you be in Tokyo?” I was on the next plane, on my own dime. I spent the next two weeks volunteering at Gox, leveraging my own personal and company resources to help them get the situation under control. I even wrote the press release about the event. I did that for the greater good of Bitcoin, and when I left, I thought—for the greater good—somebody oughta make another exchange pronto because this ship is going down in flames. We founded Payward in July of 2011.

The internal Mt. Gox ‘Crisis Strategy Draft’ that was released yesterday, if authentic, seems to indicate both a disconnect with reality and a determination that operating on a fractional reserve was a necessity, for the greater good of Bitcoin. A similar approach was discovered to have been taken by Bitcoinica, unbeknownst to its users. In both cases, if the exchange had simply exposed the truth, the damage would have been lessened. Clearly, we need to be more demanding as a community of our wallets and exchanges. Regulators have been kind enough to not enforce against unlicensed Bitcoin businesses, allowing the industry to flourish, but that means the onus is on us to keep our custodians honest.

I've been wracking my brain trying to make sense of everything. What gets me is that Mark isn't an idiot. If I assume that the Crisis Strategy Draft is truthy, a scenario like this is more plausible than what we've been fed:

Gox was robbed of a massive amount of coins (800k+) at some prior point in time, possibly June 2011, and has been operating a fractional reserve since.

Gox determined that it was better to continue operating the exchange, probably both for the sake of Bitcoin, and for their customers who would eventually be made whole from fees earned.

Gox knew of transaction malleability and had been keeping that scapegoat in their back pocket to use in the event of a bank run. Or, they didn't know but the losses from TM were actually recent and minor. Or, they didn't know but the losses from TM occurred over a long period of time and they never noticed because they never reconciled the books, because they knew they wouldn't match anyway because they were already fractional.

Fiat withdrawal problems led to an increased uptick of BTC withdrawals, outpacing BTC deposits and draining reserves to 0. This may have been compounded by an actual problem with transaction malleability that accelerated the process.

Gox spent its fiat reserves and customers' fiat reserves to buy up BTC in order to keep the ship afloat until they could launch their rebranded Gox.com and Bitpocket wallet, which they'd hoped would provide more runway in the form of additional BTC deposits.

Gox doesn't make it happen in time and is forced to shut down, negative on fiat by millions and having lost all BTC.

Look, I was supposed to write some lawyer-approved PR statement about how Kraken kicks ass and is super secure and compliant, and Payward is leading the charge at DATA, and all the great things we're doing right. Obviously, all of that is irrelevant to the guy who just lost his life savings, wondering where he can find a good bridge. If you got goxed too, I want to appeal to you to hang in there, and stick with it and not do anything stupid. I've been broke, and I've been robbed for every dime, and did I mention I sold ALL my bitcoin very early to get Kraken to launch? You've got your life, and you've got your freedom, and you've got tremendous value to this community and cause.

Bitcoin just lost a major battle and needs all the reinforcements it can get. The core dev team is underfunded and understaffed, girlscouts can’t get a wallet on iOS, banks are frozen solid, services are lacking in competent technical and business acumen. I was standing outside of 20Mission tonight talking with Jered Kenna when we were informed by a random woman passing by that "Bitcoin is hacked and dead". It’s a goddamn war and it's not going to be won without you. How many opportunities in history have we had as a people to change the world in such a positive way? If you want to join the effort, call me. If you want to jump off a bridge, call me.

05/02/2012

Diablo 3 is just around the corner and Lewt is looking for partnerships that will allow us to continue to serve Diablo players as we have for the past 11 years. Ideally, we'd like to find someone who can fulfill all of our Diablo 3 item and gold needs. This is a huge and very valuable opportunity for anyone who happens to find themselves with an abundant supply of items. You produce em, we'll do the rest.

Now, is there anything we can do to keep Diablo 2 alive? How about a game?

Offering $100,000 to the person who can most accurately predict the date and details of a major Diablo 2 content and bug patch, at least 1 month before it’s officially announced.

Offering $50,000 to the person who can most accurately predict the date and details of a patch for any working Diablo 2 dupe method. You will submit the working dupe method at least 1 month before it’s patched and it will be confirmed to be working, then not working.

Offering $25,000 to the person who can most accurately predict the date and details of a minor Diablo 2 content and bug patch, at least 1 week prior to its official announcement.

Offering $10,000 to the person who can most accurately predict the date, time and details surrounding Diablo 2's Warden being turned back on, at least 1 week prior to the official announcement.

Offering $5,000 to the person who can most accurately predict the date, time and details surrounding Diablo 2's next Rust Storm, at least one week prior to the official announcement.

Offering $2,500 to the person who can most accurately predict the date, time and details of the next Diablo 2 Ladder Reset, at least 1 week prior to the official announcement.

Offering $1,000 to the person who can most accurately predict the date and details of Diablo 2's next massive botting/hacks banwave.

12/25/2011

I sold an item for 20k forum gold, gave first, the buyer never paid and when I filed a scammer accusation, MY account and remaining forum gold got locked and I was told I'd have to pay the thief 20k fg for making an unsubstantiated claim against him. WTF!? So, maybe I didn't have an air-tight case (do you ever?) but you'd think my reputation in the community would be worth something. No matter what, you shouldn't lock someone's account for reporting bad behavior--that's just absurd. I made an attempt to contact Paul (njaguar) directly without any luck. It appears he's taken great measures to hide himself from his customers. The more I talked about what happened to me the more horror stories I heard from other people about how they'd had their forum gold locked, their accounts banned, and for stupid stuff.. like saying something that the forum owner found mildly offensive to his religion. I mean, come on.. are you running a business or what?

There is a lot I don't like about d2jsp: You can't cash out, you can't sell your forum gold to other members, you can't talk about virtual item sellers, you can't arrange trades in non-forum gold currencies, you can't review bad traders, you can't even trust that the forum gold you've got is safe because your account could be banned at any moment for any or no reason. To some extent, I understand Paul's reasoning... a fearful and ignorant population is a population easily controlled, and to maintain his profits and keep the whole forum gold racket going he's gotta rule with an iron fist. Fortunately, I'm not the type to just complain and not do anything. I knew there had to be a better way.. d2jsp's failures left a lot of room to build something better, and that something is finally ready.

What Ogrr.com does better:

1. You can cash out at any time.2. You can arrange trades external to the site.3. You can discuss anything you want.4. You can review other traders.5. Users are treated as customers, not annoynaces.

You might be thinking.. "If users can cash out, how does Ogrr make any money?" Good question. We have some of the usual fluff you can spend money on but the truth is that I don't think Ogrr will be making much money. I'll be happy if it breaks even. I've got other businesses that are paying my bills. My goal with Ogrr is to give the community a better place to trade. I do think that Ogrr could become a huge thing though and I'm putting a lot of effort and capital in to it.

How will Ogrr allow users to cash in and out? Bitcoin.

If you haven't heard of Bitcoin by now, congratulations, you're not as nerdy as most of the other people reading this post. For the jocks out there, Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer crypto-currency... It works sort of like BitTorrent in that it's not controlled or owned by any one entity. If you haven't heard of BitTorrent, well, you're probably getting laid a lot more than I am so go ahead and congratulate yourself for that too. With Bitcoin, anyone in the world can send payments to any other person in the world instantly, irreversibly, anonymously and without fees. So long PayPal! But, if you still want PayPal, it's very easy to convert your Bitcoins to PayPal. There are numerous exchanges operating that allow you to convert Bitcoin and withdraw to just about any other currency/payments platform you want. More on that later.

Ogrr will take deposits via Bitcoin only but if you don't want to use Bitcoin you're free to arrange your trades on the forum in any currency you like.

How do people acquire Bitcoin in the first place?

Well, there is a process called 'mining' in which you utilize your computer's GPU to crunch numbers and 'find' Bitcoins. I'll leave it up to you to do your own research on this as it's a bit complicated. For beginners, I'd say you should forget about mining. The best ways to get Bitcoin right now are:

1. Be one of the first 1000 Ogrr.com users to make 10 posts and receive 1 free Bitcoin.2. Sell some items you've got on the forum to someone who already has Bitcoin.3. Buy Bitcoin directly from someone who's got it--a person, one of the exchanges.

It's difficult to sell Bitcoin for PayPal because PayPal has been known to ban accounts that are caught doing this, and because of the chargeback risk. Bitcoin is irreversible, PayPal is not so you can imagine that a lot of scammers would love to give you PayPal funds for Bitcoin.

In the United States there are many ways of getting dollars in to a Bitcoin exchange, including making a cash deposit at a local bank. In other countries, it will depend on how strict the banking system is. If your banking system is very tightly controlled, Bitcoin makes even more sense for you as it's beyond any government or bank's control.

1. Bitcoin payments are irreversible--the biggest problem for sellers.2. Bitcoin payments have no fees, making microtransactions (<$1.00) possible.3. Bitcoin payments are global, making borders meaningless and currency conversion unnecessary.4. No age or jurisdictional restrictions. Anyone with a connection can setup a Bitcoin wallet in minutes.

Bitcoin makes a lot of sense for a lot of other industries as well and we're already seeing many shops starting to accept Bitcoin. Soon enough, you may have no desire to convert your Bitcoin to other currencies. The social implications of global Bitcoin adoption are pretty awesome and I hope gamers can help pave the way for everyone else.

We're looking for honest feedback about Ogrr. If anybody's got anything to contribute, feel free to drop me a line here, on Twitter or post it in the site suggestions over at Ogrr: https://ogrr.com/forum.php?f=382

09/27/2011

Sadly, most, if not all of this is true. Here's what I know: Blizzard either wants to destroy Diablo 2, they're totally incompetent, or somebody on the inside has his own agenda and the power + lack of effective supervision to carry it out. See my last post from '09 about the 1.13 patch and how they (mis)handled that.

Lewt has reported numerous Diablo 2 exploits to Blizzard (anonymously) and very few have ever been patched. Blizzard's policy seems to be: Don't patch it until it becomes a serious PR problem. I don't know what possible excuse you could have for letting a known dupe method go unchecked for 2 years before making an attempt at patching it. Then again, Diablo 2 is a business, and it's a business that isn't very profitable for them so they'd rather you played something else, like WoW. Sure, Lewt is a business too so why would we report exploits? 1. Not all exploits are valuable to us and many harm the game, which is bad for our business, 2. Our competitors are using exploits that are not necessary to us, to compete with us.

True-xC is correct in that there is no safe method of reporting a valuable exploit to Blizzard. They expect you to just submit it to their all-purpose hacks@blizzard.com. Unless you feel like handing a million dollars over to some 19 year old intern, I suggest you not submit exploits this way. You don't know who's receiving your messages and you don't know what they're doing with them. Nobody would be the wiser if the guy manning the mailbox that morning scribbled down your method, sent your email to the trash and 2 days later was in business as a duper. Also, in my experience Blizzard is not very appreciative of exploits submitted. Their respones are generally "thanks for that million dollar dupe method, now bugger off. We might patch it someday, and no, we can't discuss this any further. Goodbye." Maybe this is just me but if you come to me and tell me you've compromised Lewt's servers, I'm offering you a job 2 seconds later, not telling you to bugger off. Anyway, I don't blame guys who find exploits and don't report them--with Blizzard it's a thankless job.

True-xC is correct in that an old dupe method was patched with 1.13, and that a new, much faster dupe method was introduced with 1.13. Unfortunately, I can't go in to details but the way that this new dupe has been introduced makes absolutely no sense. It really does seem like someone intentionally put it there, and this wouldn't be the first time that has happened in Diablo 2's history. Why confirm this? Lewt benefits if this method is patched. I can't say the same for other shops, however.

What I can't confirm is whether someone on the inside at Blizzard is intentionally adding new exploits and failing to patch old ones. You'd think that if they were profiting from Diablo 2, they'd want to make the game more enjoyable, take stronger measures against spambots and farmbots, actually make a content patch once in a while. I'm leaning towards doesn't give a shit/incompetent but I wouldn't be surprised if this latest dupe was added intentionally either. There's a lot of money to be made for someone with a dupe, especially early on in a ladder reset. It's your $80k/yr salary to patch it, or $80k/mo to not patch it. When you dupe on a proxy, communicate under an alias, and have the payments go to cousin Jimmy in Hong Kong you're anonymous so why not?

It might be tempting to release the method to the public but this is something that Lewt is unlikely to ever do simply because it would destroy the economy, which would be very bad for us. Blizzard has shown in the past that they are not always able/willing to make a patch quickly. Exploits that have ruined the game have gone on for months. Remember the hexing charms and all those bugged items? They can't even update Warden for chrissakes. My guess is that if the method were made public, we'd find out how incompetent Blizzard really is. The game would be shit within a matter of days and they might just wait until D3 is out to patch it, if ever. Diablo 2 is such an old game and the people capable of making a competent patch probably don't work for the company anymore.

Hopefully Blizzard will look in to the claim against Rethek. I have no solid evidence against him or anyone else on the Legacy Team. Diablo 2 certainly has been neglected but my guess is that's a decision made much higher up. We should all be praying that they actually patch this dupe before they reset the ladder. Maybe that's what this delay is about? I'm not holding my breath.

12/19/2009

At long last, running 8 months behind schedule, a mere 16x
longer than estimated, the 1.13 Patch hits the PTR and what it tests better
than anything is player patience.

Forums are billowing with outrage over the lack of new
content.This is what we've waited
for?This is what we get for all the
thoughtful, well-researched, well-written patch suggestions that Blizzard asked
of us?This is what you killed the
ladder economy for?This is what you
skipped a reset for?This is what you
taunted us, month after month, with "soon" for?Copy/pasted patch notes add insult to injury.

It appears, however, that they did have good reason to
postpone the ladder reset.Patch notes
claim and reports confirm that they have indeed..

- Fixed an
item dupe epidemic bug.

For players, the best news out of this patch is that an old
dupe method that had been causing a lot of realm instability and lag has been
removed.A reset would have been
meaningless with duping run amok.Of
course, by launching this change on the Player Test Realm,they've given dupers a cue to ramp
up production and build stock before the patch goes live on the standard
realms.So, if the realms have been
especially unstable since the PTR launched, you know why.

Probably the most troubling news, that Blizzard hasn't let
on, is that they've known about this dupe method for a very long time, and they
let it go unchecked.They haven't wiped
any accounts or deleted any items or banned any IPs.Why patch it now?Was the dupe fix originally part of the patch
or did it only get incorporated recently?We may never know, but it is the only meaningful change in the patch so
perhaps fixing the dupe method was its primary purpose.

On the other hand, the method has seen an exponential growth
in use over the past year, which may have finally helped tip the scale from
acceptable to not.I speculate that when
the patch was first discussed 8 months ago, someone who held the dupe got spooked
and decided to sell it around in a last minute effort to squeeze a few more
dollars out of it, not expecting the buyers to have more than 2 weeks with
it.Whoops!

Duping isn't the only thing that's been on the rise over the
last 8 months though.It's almost like
once Blizzard got started on this patch they forgot about everything else.It's been over 9 months since anyone has been
banned for game spam and I can't remember the last time they really laid the
smackdown on people using 3rd party tools/hacks/bots either.

People have proposed CAPTCHA and other methods of foiling bots but Blizzard alreadyhas a powerful tool it's not using.Warden is active but it might as well not be
as it doesn't start testing a character until it's been in a game for 45
seconds.If you can finish your run or
spam in under 45 seconds, you're home free.Drop this delay to a few seconds to make farmbot runs impossible; require a correct response to Warden before a player can
speak to mute spambots.

Another thing I don't get is this increased stash
nonsense.Above and beyond an increased
stash, by far, the most requested 1.13 feature was bug fixes.New content is great, but you've got no
business going there when you haven't fixed stuff like TPPK.How about you get the game we've got working,
then think about expanding?A stash
increase would have been the icing on the cake--if you had a cake.Right now you've got something like a shitty meatloaf.Don't put icing on a shitty meatloaf.

Now, about this increased drop rate for high runes...Let me put this in to perspective.I recently spoke with someone who'd
previously been involved in a mass botting operation.This is a direct quote:"I did a year of Pindlebotting and got 2
Zods from 150 bots over millions of runs."So, guess what?You still won't
be finding any Zod runes.I'm not going
to get too far into itemization here.Suffice it to say that when duping and botting are endemic to your game,
you need to design with that in mind--especially when you aren't doing anything
much to combat them.Does it matter if
the drop rate for Zod went from 1 in 10m to 1 in 1m if you can buy them
anywhere for $0.25?

What Blizzard has produced looks like not more than a week's
worth of work.I'm holding out hope
though--hope that not everything is being tested on the test realm.I'm hoping that things that shouldn't need
testing, like new items, will greet us when the patch goes live on the standard
realms.

I'd like to know at what point Blizzard knew that the patch
was going to take 8 months to complete.It is hard to imagine with what they've delivered so far, that this
patch was ever more than 1 week from completion.Did it take them 7.5 months to get
started?Did they devote 1 day a month
to it?I don't believe that it ever
touched internal QA given the quick player discovery of a big, and obvious
problem with skill respecs--the largest feature of the patch.

Players are feeling especially burnt because they reasonably
assumed, when Blizzard asked for patch wishes, that new features would be in
addition to the long-outstanding, well-documented, highly demanded, severely
detrimental bugs that they've known or should have known about for years.

"One problem
we're running in to with some reports at the moment though is that people are
using slang terms for issues because they've been around for so long. We still
need detailed steps on how to reproduce all bugs, especially long standing
issues." -- Bashiok

Are you for real?You're really having a hard time understanding people because they're
using Diablo 2 slang?D2 is still your
game, right?Last time I checked, it was
still $40 retail for a set of Classic + Lord of Destruction.Now, I've owned my copy for 9 years.. I feel
like I've gotten my money's worth.I
just feel sorry for the guy who bought the game yesterday and paid new game
price for something that is essentially unsupported.Look, you could hire 1 guy for 5 hours a week
to keep up with everything that's going on in Diablo 2.It wouldn't be that hard.Or, you could just read your own forums once
in a while.Notice that 99% of the bugs
that people are bringing up aren't new bugs that exist only on the PTR?They've all been posted, in detail, in plain
English, on the Bnet forums before.

Just as I was about to post this blog entry, I read this:

"To give you a
small hint, nothing is going to happen or be decided until after the new year." -- Bashiok

I really don't get how you can announce to dupers that
you've fixed their method, knowing full well how many problems it creates with
the servers, and then just let it keep running on and on.Wouldn't a better strategy have been to
simply patch the dupe outright without warning, and then take your sweet time
running the rest of the changes on the PTR? I do appreciate you giving me enough notice to make plans for the holidays though. When you launched the PTR I canceled everything, thinking the patch would be launched earlier, as a Christmas present.

and this:

"I also want to impress upon
everyone that 1.13 isn't and never has been intended as a final patch for
Diablo II. I realize with the long delays in getting it to PTR, and longer
stretches of time inbetween patches that it seems like it's necessary that 1.13
encompass everything because, well, there's just no guarantee that anything
will come after. Or in a timely fashion. But, there is a solid long term plan
of action for future support of Diablo II. There's obviously plenty of room for
skepticism, and I can't blame anyone for that. But even with that skepticism I
hope that we can get the message across that we have no intention of stopping
here." -- Bashiok

Damn right there'll be skepticism.It sounds like you've basically set what's
known as a 'soft cap' on patching.If it
took you 8 months (and counting) to get out a patch representing 1 week's worth
of work, can we really believe that there will be any meaningful patches in the
future?Perhaps in another 2 years we'll
get another patch representing 3 weeks worth of real coding.Oh, but by then Diablo 3 will be out so why
even bother?I'd really like to hear
what this long term plan is for Diablo 2.

Let me pose a question to the community:

Since it appears that the 12m WoW subscribers are barely
keeping the company afloat, how much would you be willing to donate to Blizzard
toward a Diablo maintenance fund?Call
it the No More Excuses Fund.Let's say
we could get 20,000 people to each donate $5/yr.That'd be $100k/yr--enough to hire a decent
programmer who could work on Diablo 2 full-time; who could read the forums and
understand the slang; who could do a week's worth of work in less than 8
months; who wouldn't have to stop patching a dupe method to work on warcraft
sound effects.Count me in for
$100.

08/27/2009

Like most features within a
game, whether respeccing is good or bad, balanced or broken, will depend
entirely on how it's implemented.Let's
ask ourselves what some reasons for the addition of this feature might be.

1.A dramatic change to the skill trees.
I think we can safely assume that there will be at least some skill rebalancing.A respec would save a lot of characters from
the bin.

2.Improvement of game playability/enjoyability
at low/mid levels.
Something that has been missing for a long time. A respec would allow characters to invest in
skills that are good while you're playing through the game but bad for endgame. Synergies helped with this problem somewhat but still left a lot to be desired.

3.Giant changes fundamentally alter the way the
game is played.
Let me explain why respecs work in WoW and what some of the fundamental
differences are with D2.

a.In WoW, endgame
content requires a max level character. In Diablo 2, with the right gear, you
can do everything with a level 75.

b. In WoW, creating a max level character requires an insane
time investment.In Diablo 2, creating a level 75
character is a trivial feat that can be accomplished in a few hours.

c. In WoW, the best
items bind to your character.In Diablo 2, no items bind.They're all easily interchangeable between
characters on any account.

e.In WoW, content is
continuously being updated and the world is changing.In Diablo 2, you're lucky to get a
small content update once every 3 years.

I don't think I need to go on.You can
see why respecs make sense for WoW.It's
an ever-changing world with a lot of specialized stuff to do, where you need a heavily-invested character
that is not easily replaced.

Now, if Diablo 2 became more like WoW in a few of those
ways, cheap, accessible respecs might make sense.If it does not, there may still be an
argument for what I believe Blizzard has proposed--one easily obtained respec
and possibly limitless difficultly obtained respecs.

Why do it?

I think the biggest reason, aside from saving characters
from a skill rebalancing, is to make the early game more enjoyable.It's largely skipped because it's very hard
to make a low/mid level playable character that won't be ruined for the endgame.I'd like to actually play through the game
and explore areas outside of Worldstone Keep and Uber Tristram. Of course, I'd like to be rewarded for it too. I want to be able to find the best items while I'm playing through the game... maybe even some items that Baal runs won't give me.It's crazy that there are 5 acts and, for the
most part, people only play in 2 zones.

How would we go about implementing this?

Well, to make respecs valuable, they ought to require less
time to obtain than a new character at your current level.That means that a respec at level 75 should
probably not require more than a couple hours to earn.A respec at level 99 could require two weeks
to earn.I'm guessing that they'll go
with something in the middle that applies to everyone.

Are they going to make respecs a commodity?Will the trick be to cube 12 Standard of
Heroes, or will it be an intangible quest reward, or something
else?Maybe it'll be a small charm with
1 respec charge, and once it's used it's locked into your inventory forever,
reducing your capacity to 39, and by one more for each successive respec.

What are some objections? (I didn't say they were all good.)

1. It creates a one-build world.Less specialization, less investment, less
variety.

This is Diablo 2 we're talking about here.You can create a new level 85 character in a
matter of hours if you know what you're doing.If it's pretty tough to earn a respec, you won't see people doing it all
the time.. they'll likely find the build they like and stick with it.

2.It makes it too easy on noobs who don't know
how to plan ahead and allocate points.

Indeed, it does
benefit noobs a bit more than pros, however, even pros have lag-clicked an
extra point into a skill they don't need.If it's not an easy thing to do more than once, noobs will have to learn
their lesson quickly.

3.It ruins the role playing aspect of the
game.It's not very rpg-ish to have
respecs.

You're not being creative enough.Ever hear of a Hyperbolic Time Chamber?Maybe your character got knocked on the head,
lost all her memories, and got stuck in a timewarp where she did a lifetime of
training in a matter of minutes.Maybe it was all a dream and when
you respec, you're just waking up from the bad build nightmare. Who knows?Use your imagination.

4.If they're gonna do it, they should go all
the way.No limits!

The response to this is the first objection.There are a lot of reasons to limit the
respecs, at least with things the way they are now.Plus, infinite, free, easy respeccing would
surely be a bad thing for power leveling sales :P

So, that's my take on the issue.We'll just have to wait for the PTR to see
what Blizzard does.Until they screw it
up, we don't have much to complain about.

08/26/2009

I arrived in Anaheim on Thursday evening, just in time to make the BlizzCon VIP dinner/fundraiser for the Laguna Art Museum.It seemed fitting that I attend given that I own an art gallery, and a virtual items business, both of whose existence are largely thanks to Blizzard.

I was greeted at the door to the event by super cool guy, Jeff Donais.I was sure I'd seen him somewhere before but couldn't place him at the time.Later I realized it was from Wizards of the Coast, where he'd been involved with Magic.The 'dinner' turned out to be more of an hors d'oeuvre mixer cocktail party thing.The food was good though, and the live music was nice.

I was a little disappointed with the selection of Blizzard employees in attendance.It seems like they made sure not to put anybody in there who could potentially leak anything.Everyone I ran into was in art or lore development.I was much more hoping to speak with some guys who had their hands on the meat of Diablo. Not in that way. Well, sort of.

I stuck around until the silent art auction was over.Some pieces went for over $700!I thought that was pretty nuts considering that they were merely signed/framed prints, and not even part of an edition.It went to a good cause though, and some people got some cool stuff so what the heck.I grabbed my swag bag on the way out and hit the sack.

I woke up in a Northrend wind tunnel.The vents had been blasting ice cold air all night, despite my having set the thermostat set to 73 before bed.It turns out that the heater had somehow been disabled in my room and rather than the system just shutting off when it had no means of raising the temperature, it decided to keep bringing the chillstorm instead.FAIL.

So, I thaw my junk out and head downstairs for breakfast.

I stepped into line at 10am thinking I'd have no trouble making it in before the opening ceremony at 11:30am.Boy, was I wrong.Things seemed to be moving quickly at first, and after about half an hour of the line heading away from the entrance I thought I spied the apex.When I actually got to it, I saw this mess:

Where is the Prince of Darkness when you need him?We met the sun in that parking lot for a blistering hour straight.Some men perished but it was their tent-like shirts that provided the shade to save many others.They will not be forgotten.

Finally, 1 hour and 43 minutes after the quest began, I made it inside.. just late enough to miss the opening remarks.I noticed that about 15 minutes later there was no line to speak of.Tip:screw getting in on time.Sleep in, show up late, and don't wait in line.

This was my second year attending BlizzCon.I hadn't been back since the first one in 2005 where rumors were already flying about Diablo 3.I was surprised to see how much bigger the venue was this time around, and how many more people showed up.It felt overcrowded and commercialized.It was almost as if the whole event existed just to sell you more crap.

What's up with every member of every panel having a Mountain Dew bottle in front of him?I think that if Blizzard is going to have your ass addicted to your seat for 16 hours a day, the least they can do is promote a healthy diet.Diabetes Dew certainly is diabolical, but not in the good way.

Did anyone else have problems with AT&T?I'm guessing that 20k iPhone users descending on Anaheim, all simultaneously trying to blog and tweet and mobile upload totally wrecked their shit.

I managed to play Diablo 3 twice, and Starcraft 2 once.They had a ridiculous number of computers set up so the wait was less than 10 minutes each time.The downside to the short wait is that they accomplish it by kicking people out after 10 minutes.It kind of limits how deep you can get into your quests.

My impression of Diablo 3 is that they've still got a lot of work to do, and they're still making major changes to the things we've seen so far.I'd estimate it's at least 2 years away from completion.We'd be lucky to see it hit shelves by Festivus 2011.The game looks great and is very fun.I'm really looking forward to the finished product.

I sat in on the Diablo III Heroes & Monsters panel, which was pretty interesting.Unfortunately, a lot of video clips they'd prepared weren't playing.I'm guessing they've since gotten those online somewhere.Some issues I had with the game are apparently already being addressed.I was glad to hear that they have plans to make endgame content more challenging, and more random.

After the panel, I was trying to think of a reason I should stay for 2 more days.There wasn't one.Everything else could be seen online.I went back to my hotel room, packed my bag and checked out 2 days early.I dropped my car at the airport, flew back and watched the rest of Blizzcon in my underwear from the comfort of my mom's basement.

Just kidding.I have my own house, and a girlfriend.

In Second Life :'(

During the D3 Q&A session on day 2 someone asked if the Diablo 2 1.13 patch was going to introduce some lore that would facilitate the transition to Diablo 3.Jay Wilson gave the answer that while the D2 team consults with the D3 team, they're entirely independent and he can't speak for them.That answer was pretty much par for the course.It seemed like 3/4 of all the answers given by panelists were "wait and see" or "we don't know yet" or "we can't say but you'll be pleased".I'd be pleased with some F'n answers... not that everything couldn't completely change by the time the game launches anyway but wtf are you doing Q&A for if you're all locked down on NDAs?I've lost interest.

P.S. I just found out that Mountain Dew has been rebranded Mtn Dew.How ExTrEmE is that!!?!Man bro, how could you drink the Dew and NOT be a better gamer!? You know what would be better is the straight syrup. How are you supposed to game non-stop when you've gotta pee all the time? Wait wait.. product idea! MTN DOO: The world's moste extreme diapers for the world's most extreme hermits!